March 16th – Tenacatita– Jim’s Blog #33

Friday we motored our dinghy across Tenacatita Bay to the small town of La Manzanilla (as opposed to the larger town, Manzanillo, which has an airport to the south of here) to take care of some business. We knew that we needed to get over early in the morning and back before the wind started picking up. We got away fairly early, but returned a little bit late and caught the wind and waves; so we got drenched on the 40-minute trip back across the bay. This is the bay where in an earlier blog a whale breached near us and convinced us that we should be carrying life preservers in the future – and we were carrying them this time and every time since that occasion. We also took along some jackets that we wore on the way back to absorb most of the soaking.

In town we visited the internet café that I described in Blog #26. There were a number of visitors having morning coffee and we got questioned in some detail about what the cruising life was all about. This was an expat hangout and I assume most of the folks had come down from the states in campers or trailers. I had failed to notice before that the walls of the place were decorated with wild and colorful Picasso-like murals that seemed to imitate his later works – you know, when he couldn’t seem to put the arms and legs together with the torso to make a full body. This was definitely an alternative lifestyle place. In the evenings the place is transformed to a venue for local bands, although the band hadn’t shown up the previous night. We finally got a chance to catch up on our messages, send a few, update the website with blog #32, and make a few Skype telephone calls using our laptop connections.

Then we were directed to the only FAX machine in town and paid $40 to FAX 23 pages to our tax preparer. We decided it would be far better economically to buy a scanner for the boat than to pay exorbitant prices like that in the future. The woman who ran the real estate office, where we found the FAX machine, introduced herself as a CLOD (Cruisers Living on Dirt). She had already circled the world, fell in love with Tenacatita Bay, sold her boat (Sabbatical), and was now building a beach house with her husband. She said that she gave up cruising by sailboat when the sailboat started to restrict her activities. She was familiar with the coast of Mexico, along with the coasts of many other countries, but knew very little beyond about 50 miles inland. Now she was planning to remedy that for Mexico. She had an interesting perspective and one that gave me pause only in the sense that I have always liked islands, and a boat is certainly a way to see those. I would agree with her that seeing anything of the larger countries of the world would have to take more of a motor-home approach.

That evening we had the weekly dinghy raft-up in Tenacatita Bay, where everyone brings books to trade, boat cards to pass around, and food to share. We all introduced ourselves one at a time with our 12 dinghies all tied together at the bow; so we were more or less facing everyone else. Sheilagh and I traded out about six books for four others and enjoyed a variety of edibles from mixed nuts to pasta salad, carrot and cucumber sticks to rolled-up ham and cheese appetizers in tortillas, and from chips and salsa to cheesecake. We were definitely rookies there in terms of cruising, and, as the evening wore on, we got a lot of advice from the “old hands” concerning where to go in the Sea of Cortez, what to do, whom to avoid, etc. I found myself getting a bit disgruntled by the whole advice scene even though the other cruisers were trying to be helpful. We finally escaped in order to get Sheilagh to a head in time.

Later I was contemplating why I was getting upset with the advice, and I was transported back to a get-to-know-one-another day for the incoming MBA class at Santa Clara University. As part of the process, we were assigned in small groups to talk with an “older” student as to the ins and outs of the graduate program. I was placed in a group where the “older” student had gone into the MBA graduate program directly out of college and had little business experience. For about half an hour we listened to her describe which professors to steer clear of because they demanded too much of the students. Eventually I had had enough of her negativity; so I moved on to another group where the “older” student was definitely older (more my age) and more experienced. This individual was talking about which professors to seek out, and I caught at least two names of professors I had just been told to avoid. When I probed a bit further, this older student was interested in learning something to enhance her career, whereas the former “older” student was attempting to get the best grades possible with the least amount of work.

That experience was a great lesson in itself – make sure you know someone’s biases before you accept his or her advice. I was very happy with my MBA education because I sought out challenging professors where possible who encouraged discussion and didn’t furnish a “correct answer” that might appear on a test. In the case of cruising, I was noticing that there were sailors who had been cruising for a few years but who hadn’t been as far south along the Mexican coast as we had been in our first 4 months. These were the type who had one year of experience repeated five to ten times. I also decided that I wanted a chance to experience the Sea of Cortez without any preconceived notions. If I should pick an anchorage that wasn’t as well protected as another anchorage, I could find that out for myself. I could ask the locals for the best fishing spots, making a local connection while finding out. I also didn’t want to avoid certain named people in a locale just because a cruiser I had talked with didn’t like the person or persons.

While there is a lot to learn from those who have gone before, some of us just have to learn by our own experience. My daughter, Megan, inherited this gene from me, which is not always a pleasant gene to have. If “Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn in no other way,” then I have to admit to learning a lot of life’s lessons that way, whatever that makes me. The benefit to this approach is that I usually learn the lesson well enough the first time that I don’t have to repeat it.

I have started to reread the 20-volume set of Patrick O’Brian novels, known as the Aubrey-Maturin series that deals with the days of the old square-rigged sailing ships at the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th. The first book of the series is “Master and Commander,” the title of which was used for the movie of the same name, starring Russell Crowe. The movie was good for the fighting scenes, but it completely overlooked the character development between the big, tall, blonde Jack Aubrey (the British Sea Captain) and the small, short, and dark Stephen Maturin (the surgeon, who is also a spy for the British Navy). Naturally the movie got the casting backwards, with the surgeon taller than the captain, but in any case these Aubrey-Maturin novels are a great read, with very devoted readers all over the world.

So I read all 20 volumes a few years ago, passing over the words I didn’t know and imagining the ships’ movements in battle based on my sailing knowledge. This time I bought the book, “A Sea of Words,” which is a lexicon for defining words from the period that I don’t know, and it even includes two major essays: one which explains the Royal Navy and its organization during the war of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and one on Naval Medicine during the Age of Sail. I also got a companion volume, called “Harbors and High Seas,” (both by Dean King) which depicts those parts of the world where Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin sailed, describes the various ports and lands, and ties the action of the 20 novels to the real world of the time. Now I am reading this set of novels again with these two companion books in hand, and am getting even more out of the reading. Of course it helps that my bad memory makes it seem as if I am reading the books for the first time.

Why am I going into this topic of reading? The main reason is that we cruisers have discovered that we now have the time in our lives to read as much as we want, and our conversations usually include what authors and books we have found most enjoyable. This O’Brian series is one of the most popular for those who enjoy historical novels. At the same time, Sheilagh and I have discovered Janet Evanovich and her 13 novels to date centering on an accident-prone, but strangely successful bounty hunter, named Stephanie Plum. The writing is extremely enjoyable, so much so that Sheilagh or I will invariably laugh out loud as we are reading various passages. Then we have to be careful not to give away anything as we read the passage to the other. If you haven’t heard of Janet Evanovich you are in for a treat. At the same time I have to admit that the O’Brian and Evanovich series of books are so opposite in content and tone that it seems strange to be recommending them in the same paragraph. Just another glimpse into the cruising life!

Today we ended the day having dinner with John and Patti (on the catamaran, Sea Esta), a couple we had met several months ago and just ran into again. Their boat has a tremendous amount of room for a 38’ boat with plenty of room to host an entire cocktail party onboard, which they have done in the past. One of the hulls is dedicated to the kitchen and guest room, while the other has the master bedroom, navigation station, and study. The stability of the boat is amazing – they can set a drink down anywhere and it won’t slide to the edge of the table, as it would on our boat. We have to use a “flopper stopper,” a device hung out to the side of our boat on the whisker pole that helps to neutralize the sideways tipping of our boat in the swells when we are in an anchorage. Their boat has the same stability with nothing hung out to the side.

There is always a lot of discussion between sailors as to the relative merits of a mono-hull, like our boat, and a multi-hulled boat, such as a catamaran or a trimaran. While I would choose a mono-hull for crossing oceans, a catamaran seems like a great way to cruise along the shore or between islands located fairly nearby. One of the negatives of a catamaran is that it can’t be turned upright, if it should happen to capsize in a big sea, but it appears that new designs and a conservative use of sails should prevent that ever happening. A Valiant 42, like ours, has circumnavigated the globe, going around Cape Horn, where the high winds and seas turned it completely over on two separate occasions, and in both cases it came back up with the mast and rigging still in place. I can imagine the mess in the cabin, however, with stuff strewn everywhere – at least everything that wasn’t secured in a cupboard or on a bulkhead (a “wall” for non-boaters). A friend of ours in Lake of the Pines was capsized in a trimaran that he had built. If I remember right, Bill was thrown clear, but his crew had to bust through the bottom of the hull (which was pointing up) to get out of the boat.

In order to be fair, I don’t want to leave the discussion of benefits and drawbacks of multi-hulls with the single capsize drawback described above. In addition to stability, multi-hulls can travel much faster than mono-hulls, they can anchor in much shallower water, they can be run onto a beach without damage, and they have a tremendous amount of room to store stuff. Although they have two or more hulls to clean every month or so, the underwater portion that needs cleaning is much shallower and easy to get at – with the area to be cleaned probably equivalent to that of a mono-hull. My opinion is that there are benefits and drawbacks to every type of boat (as in most things in life), and it is the intended use of the boat that should be a major part of the decision process. That’s enough to cover in this blog. More Later . . .